There is, of course, also the issue of... underwear. With the dress I wrote about goes a specific underdress, also a reconstruction, and also one that was probably not made of one hundred percent good choices.

When I looked at images of the dresses with the pendant sleeves back when I did the reconstruction, most of them showed a kind of pleated sleeve on the women's underarms. So I went and did a pleated underdress with a pleated sleeve - preparing the pleat lines by drawing a needle tip through the fabric and then pressing the pleats in with a glass slickstone.

It did work quite well, but after washing, the pleats do mostly fall out. That's not such a horrible thing on the body of the underdress, as the pleats are only, if at all, visible at the neck opening, but the sleeves... well.

After fiddling around a bit with re-pleating them, trying out various methods and sequences and even using a (modern) iron, I did come to the conclusion that the easiest and nicest way to get the problem fixed would be sewing in the folds.

There was a bit more fiddling and then the additional insight that it would be much easier to get the folds in properly with less fiddling and more space to work. So I un-did the seam holding the underarm part together, unfolded all the thing, and then set to work sewing in the pleats.

It was still a little fiddly to sew them in, especially towards the top (where, thanks to the still complete seam, the sleeve wanted to curve) but it was much less obnoxious than trying to get everything sorted with the seam in. And in the end, I was successful - the pleats are not completely regular, but I don't really mind. They are in, they are fixed, and I will be able to wear a properly pleated thing on the weekend of the demo... 

Many years ago,back in the twothousands, I did a reconstruction of a dress from c 1200 with long pendant sleeves - a variation that can be seen in illustrations from that time.

Back then, I was still a student, so the budget was limited. That led to the use of a chemically dyed fine wool fabric. That is still something that I'm fairly okay with; the colour may not be the perfect woad blue, but the fabric is, altogether, something I'd still see as acceptable for a dress in that style. It's a very fine wool fabric, densely woven, and dyed an expensive colour - it will pass.

What would not pass, however, is the decorative band that I had sewn to the edges of the sleeves and the neck opening. It was a tablet-woven band. That, per se, might be okay... but it was woven in linen (chemically dyed, of course). Even worse, it was a very simple threaded-in pattern in the typical modern 4-forward-4-backward-sequence... so not acceptable at all.

The dress got a bit of wear when it was fairly new, and then it spent a lot of years in the wardrobe due to different reasons. One reason was that I'd wear more practical, more common-person dresses for my work at the market stall. The posh dress is surprisingly comfortable and it's perfectly possible to move in it, but it's still not the thing I'd choose to wear for getting the housework done. So simple, plain dresses got worn instead. There also was a timespan when I would not have fit into that dress... which I now do again.

As this year's Archäotechnika is about the medieval elite, though, I took the dress out of its storage, and got ready for a little bit of updating. The old band was removed, and instead I stitched a plant-dyed silk band onto it. 

There was the temptation to decorate it with a band woven in silk and gold, but the one I have was, sadly, a bit too short. Plain fine silk is not as posh and valuable as the gold-and-silk band, but that sort of fits in with the dress itself being wool and not silk, if you ask me. I'm going for "noble, but not filthy rich" here, sort of. 

I'm still debating if I should add a second band with a little gap in between the two...  should I?

 So - there was discussion already about the riding slits, and how folds fall in dresses with and without a middle gore, and then I got a question via Instagram about women on horses. The examples given are taken from the Codex Manesse, which is the very splendid, very famous illuminated manuscript in the Uni Heidelberg (here's the full digitised MS).

There are three women on horses in the book's images: on fol. 69, fol. 183v,  fol. 251, and fol. 316v. The last is the easiest, because the lady in question is not sitting astride, but sideways, and she's held by a man sitting in the saddle as you'd expect him to:

Now, the others are more difficult to gauge. First of all, for comparison, a man dressed in a riding coat (Reisekappe), sitting on a horse, from the same MS: 

That is a rather typical garment for travelling, and it - like the tunic worn beneath it - definitely has a riding slit cut in here. Both fall very smoothly, with almost no folds, and certainly no bunch-up folds to be visible.

For the women sitting on the horses, it looks different.

This is actually the only one of the three women where I'd be sure that she is sitting astride. There is one foot definitely visible, and it's in the correct position for medieval riding. She's also looking straight ahead with a straight body position.

Note how the fabric drapes over her leg, and how a fold comes down from under her butt behind her knee towards her ankle. My suspicion is that the bunch-up problem was solved here by having a really generous amount of fabric in the dress - so there's enough both in width and length of the dress to make it work.

For the next two women, there's also folds draping around their legs, and a cascade of folds going down under the butt towards the knee.  

She's either sitting astride and turning backwards towards the man, or she is sitting sideways in the saddle. I lean towards astride, but I'm not completely sure. Unfortunately, all her feet are hidden.

This lady is sitting even more sideways, with really curious folds of the garment. They might be intended to show bunching up - but the rest of the folding actually looks a bit more like sitting sideways to me. 

There's an image in a British Library MS that shows, very clearly, an un-slitted dress, with the wearer sitting astride, as it drapes over the horse. 

As far as I can tell, there's thus two possible solutions to the bunch-up problem: Either having garments with sufficient width and length to cover everything that is supposed to be covered even when adding part of a horse to the equation, or sitting sideways. Another thing that would be interesting to test with reconstructed garments - and some horses with reconstructed saddles...

...but wait, there's more!

Florence commented on the post about Herjolfsnaes 42 (with some issues thanks to the blog software, it seems it is very non-mathematic-symbol-friendly):

I agree that if a person is buried wearing a garment does not prove that they also wore it in life - just that their family or community deemed it proper for them to be buried in them. And then, as you mentioned, there are the Greenland finds, where the corpses were wrapped in the garments and are not wearing them, so that's another thing altogether.

My point is: Proving a negative empirically can only be done on a large amount of data. Women never wearing short garments: Sure thing, loads of pictorial evidence for that. Women not wearing garments with a riding slit: Also loads of pictorial evidence, including the pictures of women riding astride. Now, women never wearing long gowns with a closed (as in sewn shut) middle gore: I cannot tell from a picture if there is a closed middle gore or not, could you give me a few examples?
In extant garments, we only have a few examples where we are quite sure those were worn by a woman. So, out of less than 5, none have a middle gore. But that's not a lot of data.

(Granted, I'm a physicist, a sample size of n=5 tells you nothing in my field)

I don't even know an extant long garment with a closed middle gore that is a associated with a person/corpse of any gender.

..

First of all - yes, that is not a lot of data I am working on. Unfortunately, we do not have a lot of data to work on, and I completely agree that a sample size of five or less is very, very scant. 

When I looked for garment evidence for my thesis, I got about 175 items altogether, from most of Europe (with limited things from Finland, and next to nothing from Eastern Europe) and for the timespan of 500 to 1500. I tried to include extant pieces that could give information on how something was tailored, so no pieces that have just a piece of seam or hem. There's probably some more that I missed, and in the years since, some more pieces have been found (Lengberg for instance), but I'd surmise that we haven't gotten up to significantly above 200 items.

Garment finds are really, really rare.

And now for the really juicy bit... is it possible to tell from the medieval images whether there's a middle gore sewn in, or not?

There is, to my eyes, a subtle difference between how folds in women's dresses and in men's tunics are shown. It's really subtle, though, and it took me a while to sort of put my finger on it. The difference gets less pronounced when the dress is wider, and it's not visible if the dress is tucked up into the belt as to fall in different folds.

What I have only seen shown on women's dresses in artwork is the V- or U-shape of folds in the front part of the dress. These can both be seen on my dress reconstructions of St Elizabeth's and St Clare's dress, here:

You can see the U-form of the folds on the left dress, and a more subtle version of the folds running together in the front on the right. In comparison, the folds on the Herjolfsnes 42 look like this:

The folds are running straight downwards to outwards here. 

So how does this compare to medieval images? Here's one example:

On the men's tunics, the folds go straight down. On the women's dresses, the folds run towards the middle. At least that is how it looks to me - and yes, I will say again: the difference is subtle. Similar fall of folds can be seen on the other folios of the Maciejowski. (I'd like to go and hunt for more similar things in other manuscripts now, but unfortunately I'm running out of time for today.)

On many of the images that we have, it's not possible to tell how the folds run, or if there is a distinct difference between the male and female dress. Female dresses are often tucked up into the belt (not just drawn up, but a side fold of the dress taken up and stuffed in), and that will severely change how the fabric drapes and hide any "natural" front folds. Quite often, some mantle or cloak also hide what goes on in the front, for both men and women.

So in conclusion... I would not call what I see on the images as hard evidence, but to me, this impression of a subtle difference between how the women's dresses fall and drape, and how the men's tunics, especially those longer than knee-length fall and drape, is a very strong hint towards a different cut, and I would interpret that as the middle gore for the men's garments and no middle gore for the women.

What's your impression? Can you see a difference?

Here's a comparison of a mockup tunic with slits cut in, with and without middle gores around those slits: 

Well, the horse is missing from those images (due to lack of handy horses around here), but you can see that the slit functions, of course, in both instances - with and without a middle gore. However, the version with gores remains much more "closed" even in the riding position. Especially noticeable in the view on the back, where the slit is not visible even in this leg position.

The whole issue gets properly interesting, though, when you are standing normally:

As you can see, the tunic does not close properly at the back if there's no middle gore inserted. This is standing position; the slit issue gets worse, and more noticeable, once the wearer starts to move - when walking or running, the slit will gap open, unless you insert the middle gore.

So that's something you'd definitely want to do for your coverage. Not only to avoid flashing your undies, but also because the slit, staying open, will make things rather drafty in cooler weather!

What you can also see in those standing position pictures is that the fall of the tunic changes with the insertion of the gores. This is significant because riding slits are closely related to riding, which means horses, which is an expensive and status-y thing to have not just today, but also in the Middle Ages. Owning a horse that is used for riding is not something everyone can afford.

Consequently, if you're wearing a tunic with riding slits, that indicates that you have a certain amount of wealth, being a horse-rider. If that changes the fall of your tunic... it's not a big thing to insert a middle gore, with or without slit, leading to the same fall of the tunic regardless of being a horse-rider or not. So that could be an explanation for the middle gore to be found in men's tunics, whether slitted or not, but not in women's dresses. 

From the archaeological record, I know of no garment that is certainly associated with a woman with middle gores set in. There's piecings for panels in some of the later dresses (like the Golden Gown of Queen Margaret) that sit in the center front, but they do not change the fall and drape of the garment away from the straighter, more slender silhouette in the front. The fall-changing middle gore is never present. There's also no example of a slit tunic without a middle gore. 

To me, this makes perfect sense - you do not need a riding slit in a woman's dress (the bunch-up problem is solved differently, if the woman does ride a horse), but you want the slender look that is easier to achieve with a straight front and back panel in your dress. In men's garments, if you cut in a slit, you definitely need the gore to cover up the unmentionables; that changes the tunic to give it a different fall and drape. That, in turn, may have been associated with a "manly" look, or with higher status, or both, and said associations probably led to the universal adoption of the middle gore in men's garments.

I wrote: 

You need middle gores in the front and back to keep a riding slit closed when not in use (and there are no riding slits without gores in any archaeological find).

In the archaeological record, we have men's tunics both with and without a riding slit. What they have in common is the middle gore set into the front and the back.

The gore on its own would not provide enough room to sit astride a horse without the fabric riding up the legs, at least not in most cases. The Moselund tunic, for instance, is rather long, so it would have to be very, very wide for that to work. If you look at artwork from the Middle Ages, you will notice that the existence of the slit is made clear, but it's always "closed", as in there is no underwear shown. 

The way we are shown that there is indeed a riding slit is rather ingenious: There is a vertical line, and because that is usually rather inconspicuous, often the edges of the lower part of the slit are shown turned outwards, with the lining of the garment clearly visible contrasting with the outer fabric. This is the case in the image above, where a fur lining is shown. The two men next to this man have simpler slit tunics, but you can also clearly tell they are slitted: the corners at the bottom of the slit overlap, and are slightly mis-aligned. The same goes for the green garment worn underneath the red fur-lined one on Main Guy. 

A riding slit, for it to work properly, also has to be long enough. A lot of the modern interpretations in Living History have a slit cut in, but it does not reach up far enough - it has to come up to about crotch level, front and back, if you want to avoid bunching of the tunic. That, of course, is a problem if you do not have the middle gores set in, because a simple slit will inevitably stay open (especially if you hem the edges, which is the smart thing to do) and thus, if it's cut up far enough, expose your underwear. Which, back in time as today, was not something you'd usually go for.

There's currently a challenge going on in Instagram for Women's History Month: IG 14 from Austria has set out a list with a keyword for each day in March, and ask people to post something Living History or women's history related.  

Today's topic was "gender", and, well... here's a picture of me crossdressing, sort of:

I made that dress after Herjolfsnaes 42 (in Norlund's counting) way back, a long time ago. A good while later, having looked at more surviving garments, I realised that middle gores are a men's thing, and not to be found in women's dresses.

Why? You need middle gores in the front and back to keep a riding slit closed when not in use (and there are no riding slits without gores in any archaeological find). This changes the silhouette of the garment. That change, and the status associated with the riding slit, may be the reason why there are also men's tunics without a riding slit that still sport a middle gore, such as the tunic found in the Bocksten bog in Sweden.⁠ That, to me, makes a lot of sense. The dresses without a middle gore, by the way, make a slimmer seeming silhouette, and slenderness was - as we know from medieval epics - one of the aesthetic ideals for women.⁠ So this, too, does fit the picture nicely.

The dress, by the way, is very comfy and nice to wear, but would be the same without the middle gores. They don't really add anything (apart from some width...)